Of course the biggest thing for us on the devdaily.com website lately has been the release of our “Hide Your Desktop (Hyde)” app for Mac OS X systems. It’s a great app, and at 99 cents, it’s a heck of a great price.

Along with the Hyde app, we created a fun “Hide Your Desktop” video on YouTube. It’s a fun way of demonstrating how Hyde works. Many thanks to Adam for the idea to set this all to some fun music.

One thing we’ve been digging into lately is the issue of browser security, and specifically the concern about “Flash cookies”, and Flash LSO objects, which appear to be a form of cross-browser cookies. Here’s a link to a Firefox tool named BetterPrivacy, which discusses the Flash LSO problem.

Confessions of a Microsoft employee: Microsoft was dysfunctional, and hurt by poor strategies and turf battles. As someone looking on at Microsoft from a distance, here’s my favorite quote from this story:

“The company as a whole seemed more and more focused on chasing competitors into any business where they might someday present a threat — which to me always felt like ego on the part of SteveB [CEO Steve Ballmer]”

I’ve quickly become a fan of the Zen habits website. I like some of the productivity and simplicity comments I’ve read there, and even approaching the topic of “motivation” from a Zen Buddhist perspective is interesting.

We’ve been writing some Java Swing code lately, and somewhere along the way we got caught up in the list of color keys in the Java UIManager class. These keys are cool, because if you use them properly, it can help keep the colors in your Java/Swing application consistent within the application itself, as well as consistent across platforms.

While working on our Swing app, Al just wrote this “list of UIManager color keys” tutorial. Hopefully the source code and list of color keys in that article will be helpful to other Java developers in their Swing/GUI development work.

And now, it’s back to our regularly-scheduled Swing app development work…